In terms of the collocation of sentiment, attraction and revulsion that is associated with what Bataille writes — and we note that this is how metonymy functions — Bataille can be read as the overtly, affirmatively esoteric secret (that is to say, for those who do not lose themselves in the allure of either the Sufis or indeed, and on the other, darker side of the psyche, Gilles de Rais/de Sade) to Nietzsche’s reception in France. Along with Heidegger and Klossowski and that is to say before and apart from, because part of, Deleuze and Derrida and Foucault. Everyone else comes later.
Beyond Kojève, Bataille himself is the ultimate signifier for a quasi-, that is almost, that is obliquely Nietzschean influence.
Thus and by way of a remove or via the conniving separation of the arch French conceit/conviction of “formation,” it may be argued that Bataille filters Nietzsche’s importance in France.
Alan Schrift’s Twentieth Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers (New York: Wiley, 2004) makes the claim that Heidegger lacks influence in France owing to the enthusiasm for analytic philosophical themes characteristic of leading French scholars such as Jules Vuillemin, Gaston Granger, Jacques Bouveresse, etc. Although Schrift is uttery accurate about analytic philosophy (currently increasingly influential in professional expressions of philosophy on the “continent,” as indeed the world over), the judgment he offers on Heidegger in France is unpersuasive as I would and have argued (for instance in Babich, Words in Blood, Like Flowers: Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Nietzsche Hölderlin Heidegger [Albany: SUNY Press, 2006]). See, too, if for a more historically focused view, Ethan Kleinberg’s Generation Existential: Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927-1961 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
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